In spite of its attempts to sabotage itself with comedy, Lady in the Fog (also known as Scotland Yard Inspector) is a successful noirish British thriller from 1952. An adaptation of the debut story in what would become a long-running BBC radio series, it takes a while to get going – two thirds of its running time in fact – but as it enters the home straight it finally gets its act together and finishes grippingly, satisfyingly and at speed.
Being British and being made by Hammer – before the studio shifted into horror – it features a second-string American star in a lead role. Here Cesar Romero plays Phil O’Dell, an American writer stuck in foggy London who gets caught up in the unexplained murder of the brother of a young woman he’s just met.
An all-too-common case of hit and run in the dense fog, say the police. Surely not, says the dead man’s sister. And so, since Scotland Yard won’t take the case seriously, and handily dressed in a detective trenchcoat, O’Dell decides to turn amateur cop, to kill time until his fogbound plane can take off, encouraged by the big doe eyes of young Heather McMara (Bernadette O’Farrell), sister of the dead man.
The film plays to Romero’s history as a Latin lover. Plays also to the US image of the UK – tweedy, foggy and full of flatfooted boys in blue incapable of solving anything. And plays about with the noir template, trying to inject humour. Like in the opening scene where O’Dell is making a cocktail from a wild array of ingredients and concocts one that bubbles and hisses ominously before eventually exploding – cue terrible super-imposed mini-mushroom cloud. Like later stabs at comedy – such as O’Dell’s interactions with a travel agent endlessly re-scheduling his journey – it falls flat.
Yet the film survives and even thrives, thanks to Romero’s determination to be energetic and serious about the role. And thanks to good side players. Bernadette O’Farrell would later become most famous as Maid Marian to Richard Greene’s Sherwood Forest outlaw in the long-running TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood. She’s initially a bit crap here, to be frank, fluffing early lines, but settles down eventually into the sidekick/potential love interest role and, taking her lead from Romero, gives the film more forward drive.
In villain roles two faces familiar from the Bond movies – Lois Maxwell (Miss Moneypenny) as a slinky nightclub owner and Geoffrey Keen (a minister of defence in six Bond movies) as a smooth, cigar-smoking film studio boss whose bluff honesty – I know nothing about film-making etc – adds a nice twist of lemon.
The fog comes and goes as and when the plot demands it. In fact everything comes second to the plot in this film. Logic is tortured by it, characters altered, dialogue dives off up weird non-sequitur avenues, just as long as the plot keeps moving.
Raymond Chandler need not worry but Lady in the Fog does even manage some wild, out-there, Chandleresque plotting when it gets into its stride, especially with the introduction of Martin Sorrowby (Lloyd Lamble), a mad inventor in a lunatic asylum who is a link on the way to finding the killer.
It’s obviously done on the cheap – or else O’Farrell’s fluffs would have been reshot – and setting a film at least partly at a film studio allows Hammer to use that studio as a set, no further expense necessary.
The strange thing about this film is how awkwardly it starts but what a well oiled machine it’s become by the end. The writing clanks in early scenes but that unkinks itself too. Sam Newfield’s direction understands that pace is what this is about (it’s only 73 minutes long), and Ivor Slaney’s score hits all the right, bright noirish notes, though it’s a bit loud in the mix.
For much of its length it’s a bit of a puzzle. Is this American film noir subjected to ironic British understatement? Or fusty British culture exposed by the withering light of an American genre?
Either way, ultimately its success comes largely down to Romero, an under-rated talent pigeonholed on account of his ethnicity. He’s good, very good, but then he always was – he’d later be the first actor to play the Joker on screen, in the TV series Batman (with trademark moustache visible beneath the greasepaint), a characterisation so vivid that people are still playing to and against it all these decades later.
Lady in the Fog (as part of the Forgotten Noir: Vol. 9 box set) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
